


Prayers

by kerlin



Category: JAG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:37:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're not a religious man, despite the saying about atheists and foxholes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prayers

“I wonder who he prayed to for that one.”

You know she didn’t mean for you to hear those words, but you spent years with your senses attuned to the hum of jet engines, the buzz and snarl that told you if you would live another few minutes or not. And then words became your life, and hearing them became your new measuring stick for being the best.

You don’t break stride, don’t hesitate as you walk back to the courtroom, but you consider her words for the split second it takes for you to arrive at an answer.

You’re not a religious man, despite the saying about atheist and foxholes. Might as well add a clause about aviators and angels thirty because you’ve known many a pilot who takes to the air with a rosary in his breast pocket and a Hail Mary on his lips.

You realize that you’re probably not a religious man because you’re not the type of man who lays his fate at another’s feet, omnipotence aside. Your problems are your own, and your solutions are your own as well.

And so when you took to the skies again, when your own private miracle came about and you found yourself once more in the cockpit of a Tomcat, it wasn’t a rosary that you had in your breast pocket and it wasn’t Mary’s name on your lips.

You watched her with Brumby across the small table, in the smoky room, and you ran your finger along your bottom lip and remembered her fingers there, on the submarine, her lips there, on the docks at Norfolk.

You worshipped her with your eyes, as you have done so many times from afar, and you wondered again why, for someone who lives with words and wields them as tools, you’ve never been able to voice your own private prayer for her.

She asked you to. She asked you to make that leap of faith. And you couldn’t. Your problems, your solutions - your screw-ups.

The wood of the courtroom door is warm under your fingertips and you hesitate for just a moment, because going back inside will mean facing the world again, the world where you’ve ruined the most important chance ever given to you and where your friend has stopped believing in miracles because a baby who bore her name is now an angel, someone else to hear prayers even though she belonged here on Earth with her parents.

You push the door open and enter the courtroom.


End file.
